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That aside, it's reassuring to know that a simple driver hack is still all that is required and that it is just a hurdle that Nvidia is introducing, not an outright incompatibility between Nvidia and AMD GPUs :)Reply

So let me get this straight... NVidia is intentionally disabling a feature in their drivers simply because another brand of GPU is in your system, and apparently not for valid technical reasons because things work just fine when it is enabled. Isn't this exactly the kind of BS that should spawn anti-trust litigation?Reply

Its close but its only disabling the physx ability on the nvidia card or ageia ppu (since nvidia owns ageia now they can do that) not the actual "3rd party" gpu card. You can still run multiple desktops on multiple cards etc etc you just cant get physx if your system has a different gpu in it.

The issue I have with them doing this is its dumb. You want people to buy your hardware and yet your top gpu isnt as fast as the competition... So lets stop them from buying our hardware for use in physx games so we also f*ck over those people that make physx heavy games for all but Nvidia customers. At least if they allowed heterogeneous video cards and physx people would still buy their cards just to play a game with... thats MOAR PROFITS Nvidia! That will also push MOAR PHYSX GAMES into the market... then if there are enough games on the market with physx to make people give a damn .. people will buy your cards for their ability to do physx and not buy the competition even if the competition is a little faster for the same price. Reply

It was never advertised as a supported feature, the way that the "Install Other OS" and Linux support was advertised with the PS3. Many people used that as a consideration when they purchased the PS3, and then effectively had the rug pulled out from under them. The PhysX issue is a bit less murky, in that they have always prevented you from using a mixed pair of cards with PhysX enabled (GPU, not the PPU add-on) - despite the fact that there are numerous advantages to be had. So it's less a case of removing a feature as it is a case of never having been smart enough to allow it to begin with.

its nvidia's property now they can pretty much do what ever they want with it. Same thing with their gpu's supporting physx while another brand of gpu is in the box. Its their decision and they (IMHO) made the wrong one.

God forbid someone goes out and buys a 200 dollar nvidia card after they already have a 500 dollar amd card the world might end right Nvidia?Reply

Is it legal to block people from using a using the original PPU's with a non-Nvidia gpu? They were sold with the ability to be used with in gpu correct? Then Nvidia bought the company and dropped that support. Reply

yes its legal because its nvidia's property. Its like remember when amd cpu's used to fit in intel motherboards? When amd started making its own boards (or intel sued them to stop that I dont know which happened) they were no longer interchangeable... you cant sue amd for not making cpus that work on intel boards anymore.

For those of you who dont remember 1994... amd used to make a risc printer chip but got tired of making drivers for every OS so they added some x86 registers to it and reformed it into a cpu. It was an alternative to intel's cpu and it was touted as faster but I dont know if it was or not (I went with the cyrix chip... biiig mistake). Anyway, when intel started making these huge slot style processors amd started making their own motherboards and the two roads diverged.

You cant go sue amd for not making a slot style processor (even though there was a slocket adapter out there for 20 bucks) because amd chose to go another route. It was their decision and while it might have hacked off a lot of their customers its still legal. Same thing with nvidia choosing not to allow physx if theres an amd board in the system. Not a wise decision (shows that they are not a "cool" company) but its their call and they made it. Reply

Then you pay a full product to have 75% functionality because they are wanting a polarized market. (Do you remember the remarketed emu10k1 ?). Then, an analogy is when you buy a car but can´t use the gasoline as you wanted ( generally a better one) because your car manufacturer entered an agreement with a gasoline distributor flag, and you don't have any control over it because your car won't start when a sensor find other gasoline. Do you need more reasons than this to hate proprietary softwares ?Is it a bug ?Yeah, a bug that provides a great functionality that people are hacking to have, a Bug for Nvidia, not for the users. Nvidia, we pay for a full product, with decent and unlocked software, not a proprietary software blob full of defects (caped functions).You deserve people sharing those drivers at any form, and at an incontrolable rate.Reply

I just bought a new Radeon to replace my GTS 250. I thought about trying to use my GTS 250 for PhysX but, after turning on the PhysX indicator to see how many games actually use gpu physx I have decided not to bother. Unfortunately, the vast majority of Physx games are cpu only.Reply

I have been disappointed by Nvidia in the past with things similar to this, so while I am not an ATI fanboy, I prefer to avoid Nvidia products due to poor software support. First it was poor audio drivers and long times between updates with the Nforce2. Then the Nforce3 was advertised as supporting 64-bit operating systems of the future and never had drivers released for Vista or Windows 7. Also it did not support AGP cards from ATI in those OS when using a dual-core CPU, but Nvidia GPUs worked ok. The ATI AGP cards, such as Radeon 3850, worked fine in Windows 7 with VIA or SIS chipsets and had drivers.Very strange... I currently have a Radeon 5770 and have been considering picking up a used Ageia PPU on ebay to try out, but after hearing this I wish someone would flush the toilet on PhysX so the smell goes away. I haven't looked into it, but hopefully something like Havoc, or an open alternative will be released for OpenCL or even DirectCompute. If we don't send a message to these companies that we don't like artificial software limitations imposed on hardware that we have purchased they are just going to keep doing it.Reply

i then sent an e-mail to nVidia in refards to this and my last post contains nVidia's replies :

i have the 64 bit RC of Win 7 installed and running just fine, but according to nVidia when i e-mailed them about windows 7 drivers for the nforce 4 chipset, i recieved this :

in the 1st e-mail reply :

"The nForce4 chipsets are EOL and do not meet Microsoft's 7 System Requirements and this is the reason why we do not distribute any driver for the nForce4 chipsets. However, you can always use Windows 7 in-box driver with the nForce4 chipset. If the Windows Vista driver works fine for the nForce4 chipset, then, I suggest you to continue using the Vista driver for stable performance "

and the 2nd reply :

" However, the nForce4 series of chipsets are not compatible with the Windows 7 OS as these chipsets was manufactured by using the old technology which are now not capable of supporting the software and hardware required by Windows 7 operating system. So due to these drawbacks, the nForce4 series of motherboard cannot be used with Windows 7 OS "

now where does it say in the windows 7 hardware requirements specifically what hardware is and is not compatable with windows 7 ?? Ie Chipsets.......

i am currently using the 64 bit Vista drivers, which i have been using since probably July when i installed the RC to try out 7, and now would like official windows 7 drivers from nVidia for the OS, as i plan on getting the retail release of Win 7 for my main comp, as well as possibly 2-3 other nForce 4 based comps. i also have some friends which are running nforce 4 based motherboards as well..

would official win 7 drivers be any different the vista drivers ?? or is this a case of nVidia not making " offical " win 7 drivers just because the chipset has been moved to EOL for them, even though there are probably ALOT more people out there that are also running the Nforce 4, and there for it comes down to being a case of nVidia is just not interested is supporting its customers with something as simple as a driver ??

wow that sucks dude... im using an asus p4p800 deluxe running a 3ghz socket 478 p4 and it works just fine with the win 7 drivers. Granted its not 64bit but its older than your board and works just fine.Reply

how do you figure? the nvidia cards last gen were faster and if you didnt put an amd card in the box you have physx. The cards this gen are faster (just not by much) and they are the same price this time.

You think so ? I think GTX470/480 and Fermi suck.Nvidia is on the wrong road, with theri overpriced SLI chips. They should be giving it away for free, so thatit open's up a bigger sale in videocards. Now this, with Physics. They are too greedy and if they continue on this path; i see a dead end at the horizon for them !Reply

Has anyone uploaded the older driver anywhere? This is a perfect case for "information wants to be free". Once you let the cat out of the bag you are not supposed to be able to put it back in again, especially if you are a big evil corporation. I'm disappointed in the intertubes. Someone should upload a torrent for the older version of 257.15 to the pirate bay or something. It's real tricky of them that they kept the version number the same even though what they claimed to be doing was fixing a bug. Normally you would give the fixed version a new number. But that would have made it so much easier for people to find the hybrid driver version. Nvidia is clever but so evil.Reply

Their tendancy to contrive driver conflicts creates the situation where users cannot have the two main VGA manufacturers on the same machine.

Since physics is not a big issue in games today and ATI have cooler cards PC builders are not necessarily going to choose nVidia, in fact this may well work against them since you dont want that kind of driver conflict going on with a new machine. By the time physics is an issue all this hardware will be completely out of date anyway.

Like their expensive fat hot research oriented graphics cards nVidia are shooting at the wrong target again. It reminds me of the famous flopping folly of Sinclair.

What were they thinking?Who is driving the bus?What are they smoking?Why are the shareholders letting them?Reply

Youre not thinking about this from a business standpoint. what would you want people to do go buy your competitor's top card then buy a cheap 100 dollar card of yours or buy your top card to get physx and better fps?

the decision to stop the customer from using physx while theres a competitors board in the system is one to try to get more people who want to play physx games to buy nvidia. Physx is an nvidia product, physx games are best run on nvidia (depending on the level of physx objects), and why in their right mind would nvidia allow someone not using nvidia hardware exclusively, run a game that requires their hardware? You wouldnt complain when your vhs tape didnt fit in your dvd player would you? Because thats about the level of stupidity you seem to have when blaming nvidia for not allowing people buying the competitor's product to use their technology too. Reply

You have to remember that their decision is based entirely on business. While it sucks for consumer, its good for them. If you were them you would not want someone to be using an ati card as a physx or even to be using ati as your main and nvidia card as the second. That would degrade the nvidia brand. They spent money purchasing the technology and incorporating it into their cards for free to the consumer, the least a consumer can do is purchase nvidia only cards. A lot of businesses use this tactic and Nvidia is no different. The good side of all of this beta driver is that now if you want physx with ati card, it is possible as long as you stick with this driver set and ones downloaded from before the fixed date and your all set.Reply

Their businessplan sucks, and they better wake up before it's too late. You can make "business" for a while, screwing the comsumer. One day, the consumer will turn their back on you....an then what? Right!They are wrong from the start, asking money for theri SLI feature. A feature, which enlarges their videocard sales. So why put a "lock" on it by making it expensive, even before you decide top buy theri videocard?No, it's shortsided and that's why they are gonna loose customers, and money on the long term.Good business ? No way!Reply

It is stupid AND short-sighted : it screws Ageia PPU owners and open room for class action law suits from these owners.it limits video cards sales: there are people who would happily spend money on a small NVIDIA GPU just for the bragging rights on their ATI systems.And the worts consequence of all: it further limits the hardware install base for Physx: game developers do not bother with PhysX because the installed hardware base is small and keeps getting smaller everytime NVIDIA do stupid things like these.Reply

ive got an ageia ppu... its a paperweight compared to my gts250. seriously anyone using one of those cards for physx is out of their minds at this point. If you want physx that bad just buy an nvidia card and STFU about it.Reply

Well it works for Apple, and it works really well. They just suprassed Microsoft in market value. Nvidia is not talking about sli for their graphics they just want you to use an old nvidia card. Most of us probably have those around. In the end, I never really care because i just let the existing card do the work.Reply

Im guessing you never played warmonger operation downtown destruction. The gameplay is simplistic but its on the U3 engine and you can destroy just about everything in that game. Wish they had taken it further though tbh. Physx just makes that game a blast to play.Reply

I suspect that that bullet physx will be the next big thing. Maybe havok cloth for a while. But either way if what you say is true then havok would have been out of business a long time ago not sitting on their high horse charging 250k per title for their physics engine. Nvidia's physx sdk is free and its hardware accelerated... it just pisses off all the amd fanboys that they cant play physx games. Which also makes it a bad idea for nvidia to pull this move to block amd guys from playing physx games because at this point physx is not a huge reason to buy a game. If physx was the defacto standard for most games then nvidia could announce that they were stopping support for heterogeneous cards. But stopping it now is like going off to war without any ammo... yeah sure youve got a great weapon but it doesnt have any bullets.Reply

When PhysX starts to fade all the technical problems with heterogeneous GPU PhysX will go away and NVidia will start talking about a feature and not a bug. But it is going to be too little too late.Reply

Because Nvidia published the same driver version both with and without the restriction, it should be fairly trivial to examine the drivers to determine what is enforcing the restriction, making it easy for people to remove it on their systems.Reply

My next GPU will be an ATi graphics card, I've had enough with their driver's BS, I run another computer with ATI drivers and I have NONE of the issues that I have had over the past year with my GTX 260.Reply

Ive run nvidia cards for over a decade and have not ever had one problem with them ... well except for that one time i froze my tnt2 card to get the epoxied fan off because one of the blades broke off while I was screwing around inside my pc. But that wasnt nvidia's faultReply

Nvidia is not the only one caught red-handed with their "lackluster" drivers.

For starters, ATI here is not giving us an option to disable severe trilinear optimizations with R800 (5xxx) cards. The optimizations, even when 16x AF is enabled, actually make the mipmaps look a tad bit more on the bilinear side than trilinear (hence the term brilinear). In many scenarios, the harsh line of mipmap transistion becomes rather annoying when the camera is in motion (as opposed to still screenshots). Disabling Catalyst A.I. does not resolve this issue on 5xxx GPU's--disabling it would not be a good idea for compatibility issues with some games anyways--especially crossfire.

They left the restriction out of the beta drivers 257.15 and man Batman AA looks great rendered with a 4850 X2 and 9800 GT as a PPU. I've used them and they work. So I don't know how this slipped by everybody but it still works and if you happen to have an ATI GPU or GPUs a simple Nvidia GT 220 for $50 or $60 can do the PhysX job quite well. PhysX actually loads the 3D graphics renderer quite a bit so you will need a strong GPU performer for higher res and max detail for the added effects. I hope they will continue to leave support enabled for Hybrid PhysX in the future in all unsupported beta drivers.Reply